The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes
Fashion wasn’t always as destructive of an industry. Clothes shopping used to be an occasional event—something that happened a few times a year when the seasons changed or when we outgrew what we had. But about 30 years ago, something changed. Clothes became cheaper, trend cycles sped up, and shopping became a weekly hobby for many. Enter fast fashion and the global chains that now dominate our high streets and online shopping. But what is fast fashion? Why is fast fashion so bad? And how exactly does it impact people, the planet, and animals?
How Fast Fashion Is Destroying the Planet
Fashion, it turns out, is the true opiate of the masses. Across the country, while inflation has siphoned middle-class wealth, American consumers have enjoyed a consolation prize: Apparel is dirt cheap. In 1993 you could buy a T-shirt for $13 — and get a midsize tank full of gas for about the same. Today the full tank would cost more than three times as much. That T-shirt? $12.74.We know the human cost of this benefit. One sweltering day in Bangladesh 10 years ago, workers at the Rana Plaza garment factory complex raised alarms about cracks in the building. They were threatened with the loss of a month’s pay if they stayed home. The building collapsed the next day, killing 1,134 people and injuring over 2,500.
A subsequent, legally binding accord between trade unions and (still too few) brands improved building safety in Bangladesh. And yet, while that one problem was addressed, today even less attention is being paid to the welfare of the people who work across the industry. Over the last decade, the voices of the over 75 million vulnerable workers in the global garment and textile industry have been, like the products they made, steadily devalued.
It wasn’t always this way. From the Industrial Revolution until the end of the Cold War, the apparel industry was the world’s most important engine of human development. In mid-19th-century Manchester, England, the textile trade fostered technological leaps that led to higher wages and lower prices for consumer goods.
By the turn of the century, Eastern European Jews and other immigrants built the Lower East Side’s garment district into not only a wealth generator but also the vanguard of a national workers’ rights movement. In the 1960s the apparel industry in South Korea anchored the postwar recovery and then expanded to other Asian countries. After Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, China’s apparel industry helped spark economic growth that contributed to one of the largest exoduses of humanity from absolute poverty. Apparel has served as an escape from subsistence farm work for billions of people.
Today that engine has stalled in first gear. The average garment worker earns barely half the pay needed to reach a decent standard of living. The monthly minimum wage for a Bangladeshi garment worker is equivalent to $75, meaning a worker can make less than $3 a day. Many are unable to afford staples like meat. The easy scapegoat for the miserable working conditions many apparel workers labor in is fast fashion, a business model popularized by the likes of the Zara founder Amancio Ortega (No. 14 on Forbes’s billionaires list), which chases hit runway trends with rapid production. But such companies — like Shein, with its staggeringly low prices and opaque supply chains — are symptoms, not the cause.
One aggravator is the current purchasing habits of millennials. The first modern American generation whose members hit their 30s in worse economic shape than their parents, millennials came of age during the Great Recession slammed by student debt. Inflation has pushed housing, energy, food — all the essentials of life — farther beyond the grasp of many. As a result, many younger Americans aren’t yet putting their wallets where their values are. That downward pressure, combined with diminished labor power, means that the $1.5 trillion apparel industry has fallen to a place of widespread abuse that would not have looked out of place in the early years of industrialization. In 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, enforcing a legislative mandate to prevent goods made with forced labor from entering U.S. markets, stopped $816.5 million worth of products — up from $55 million in 2020 — including garments. Transparentem, the nonprofit investigative group that I founded, has exposed numerous abuses in the supply chains of dozens of companies — including forced labor, child labor and highly polluted working environments.
